EVE General Discussion

What Tippia is saying is that people "convert" PLEX into ISK by selling them. But the PLEX still exists after that sale until the player who bought it does something to remove that PLEX from the game. It is not the same thing.

As for PLEX encouraging RMT it works just the opposite.

Option A: You can go buy ISK, 1 billion ISK for something like $5.

Option B: You can buy a PLEX for $19.95 and sell it in game for 1 billion ISK.

Option A will put ISK in your wallet and comes with a probability of being caught by CCP where they destroy that ISK (i.e. take it out of your wallet, or whatever you spent it on) and you get a warning. Do it often enough and you'll be banned, permanently.

Option B is no way violates the EULA you get your ISK and put a few extra bucks in CCPs pocket.

PLEX basically puts downward pressure on the RMT ISK. This means that as the price falls for RMT ISK less and less people will be willing to devote time to acquiring the ISK to sell. In theory, less RMT, less bots, etc.

At first I was like, this is dumb.

Why did I waste my time reading this and why did someone spend so much time writing it? Thinking it? Caring about it.

But then I was like, yea whatever. . . .

Ban them. Anyone involved in any non-ccp controlled/owned/directed website that participates in gambling or lotteries involving real currency needs to have all of their personally licensed characters banned and deleted.

Wrong. You are just talking nonsense.

Thank you everyone for actually being able to articulate what the supposed hubbub is about. So the OP is upset about a situation where everything is almost the exact opposite of what he's saying.

It's not RMT — it's a real-life transaction.
It's not PLEX — it's time codes.
The EULA is clear — he's just not looking at the right part of the EULA.

The actual issues are:
• Is he a retailer who is allowed to trade in time codes? (Afair, reselling timecodes is a big no-no if you're not a vendor).
• Is he a allowed to run a lottery? (Most countries have laws about on-line gambling).
• …or is a time code to be considered an in-game item, in which case all of the above is already covered by the ToS.

Tippia wins on a technicality as usual.


I'm surprised you managed to decipher what the OP was blubbering about. Thanks for the translation. I assume that if this is based in the US, the gambling aspect would be illegal?

I Think some people in here confuse PLEX with Eve Online Gametime Codes.

A PLEX is an Item that can be used and traded ingame only. CCP can and has disallowed this item to be traded for actual money. Offering the chance of of getting a PLEX or real money is not a valid workaround.

An Eve Online Gametime Code is a License Key that grants the right to use EVE Online within the boundaries of the EULA when activated.

When someone buys an Eve Online Gametime Code from a third party (thats anyone who is not CCP), he usually does not agree to the EULA/TOS of CCP. In fact, CCP is not even his contractual partner - not until he decides to sign a contract with CCP agreeing to their EULA/TOS. Thats that....

Now most of the buyers of those Eve Online Gametime Codes already have agreed to the EULA/TOS and that fine. However, that doesn't mean they have sold their soul and will have to do everything CCP says. Regarding the Eve Online Gametime Codes, at least in the EU, an agreement restricting the re-sale of them, is legally void ( reference: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-128/11 ).
Brief summary: This Judgement is about UsedSoft GmbH (‘UsedSoft’) and Oracle International Corp. (‘Oracle’). UsedSoft wanted to resell used licenses and Oracle disallowed that as per their TOS. Now I'll spare you all the legal stuff, but basically it says that once a company sold something to someone, they cannot forbid that someone to resell it. Like when I buy a CD, I can go and sell it so a friend or some 2nd Hand store etc. Now Oracle thought this was not the case for software licenses and therefore disallowed reselling those, but the Court rules that is indeed applied to software licenses as well and that any agreement restricting that is legally void.

Going back to the fact that an Eve Online Gametime Code is a license which grants the user the right to use Eve Online for a limited amount of time (30 or 60 days), re-selling them cannot be disallowed via the TOS/EULA and any agreement to not do so is void.

Now, thats for the EU only, but, on the one hand, I don't know where the person is question resides, and on the other hand, I am sure CCP doesn't want to treat their customers unequally :)


I Conclude: At least in the EU, it is no problem at all to buy and sell (or raffle away) Eve Online Gametime Codes.

There is inconsistencies with CCP's stance on RMT all over the place.

- You can create a website, hire writers with isk while earning $ from advertisers

- Streamers can charge $5 for paid subs and then give them better prize chances (or just better prizes all together)

- You can buy PLEX's in the Steam Store using cash earned from other things (the example used was selling a knife from CS:GO and using that cash to buy PLEX's)

so this is on par with CCP having no idea how to handle this.

What I would also like to see is a legit thesis on why RMT is bad (other then it might take some cash out of CCP's pocket, but they could that back 10 fold if the game catches on.... I use CS:GO as an example)

1. The people writing are not giving you the money, though. There are three parties involved in that scenario, not just two.

2. This is explicitly prohibited in CCP's monetization policy which was mentioned elsewhere in this very thread.

3. Why would the initial source of money be of any concern to CCP? The only thing that is illegal in this context is paying a third party real money for in-game ISK. How you pay for an official transaction between you and CCP is of absolutely no concern to anyone except maybe the IRS.

I just watched MarkeeDragon's video on RMT and in some ways he has good points (note I said in some ways, I do not fully agree with him). For example, the whole PLEX/GTC thing is RMT when you define RMT broadly. A player takes RL money and converts it into ISK (yes, it is a multi-step process as Tippia has pointed out so in a narrow sense it is not RMT). CCP was very clever by defining various things the way they did so that technically speaking it is not RMT as defined by the EULA/ToS and so forth. Still, using a "common sense" approach RL money is being used to move ISK around between wallets in game.

So I think it is fair to say that CCP does know how to handle this and as with many things sometimes stuff slips by and people take advantage of it.

One of the problems with RMT is that suppose CCP says, "F*** it, let the market determine everything." Now in game items take on RL value. And if CCP shuts down then every player is now a creditor. If at the point of shut down 1 billion ISK = $1, then somebody who has say 500 billion ISK worth of goods/in game items now can claim $500 from CCP during bankruptcy. It just adds to the list of creditors.

Another possible issue is the international issue of the game and that by allow RMT one could argue CCP is now a bank, and an international one at that which means all sorts of additional regulation on top of that.

All these problems are neatly dodged by part of the EULA/ToS that say, "You the player own nothing in game, CCP does. You are merely renting access to these items. And said items have no value." That is why the GTC/PLEX thing is so clever, it creates a nice fiction right between RL monty and ISK.

One of the other problems with throwing open wide the doors on RMT is that it will provide incentive for people to bot and generate ISK. And that is a problem if you have a literal and legal exchange rate between in game ISK and RL currencies, not to mention that botting is bad for the in game economy as well. And even if you try to stop botting in game, why provide an extra incentive.

Oh...and when you have RL money connection to RMT, then things like hyperinflation in game become a thing too. Hyperinflation is not just "high inflation" it is more along the lines of a currency crisis where the people in that economy no longer trust the monetary authority to regulate their currency. Regulating ISK will become more demanding if there is an actual exchange rate between ISK and say dollars, euro, pounds, etc. For example, suppose CCP gets into very desperate trouble and they create a metric crap ton of ISK convert it to euros, dollars, etc. then declare bankruptcy and what happens to all those people holding ISK?

And do we really want corporations issuing their own fiat currency?

I think the problem he is trying to describe is this.

Player 1 - Want to play eve and buy plex with isk to play eve.
Player 2 - Wants to buy plex with isk "not to play eve" but to gamble with it in out of game gambling site
Player 3 - Wants to convert isk into $ out of game i.e. RMT

Player 1 is mining his asteroid and saves up 500 Mill isk. He goes to the trade hub to buy his plex and finds that the isk price of the plex has doubled and now he can't afford to keep playing the game so he has to unsub.

Player 2 and those like him bought up tons of plexes in game causing the price to skyrocket so that they could support their out of game plex gambling habit. So from this the game market is being seriously affected by out of game EULA violating (as far as I know) activities.

Player 3 runs the gambling site and either scams people outright or just relys on the personality that most gamblers have that they can't manage to actually quit while they are ahead and gets thousands of plexes a month. You may ask how does he rmt them? I hope I'm not giving away any secrets here as far as I know this particular practice has been stopped a few years back. Still I know one tactic they use to do was to load up hundreds of plexes into a noob ship in jita. They would fly out to a random planet or moon usually at 0k to the warp in where another noob ship on an unassociated noob account was waiting. They then jettison the plexes and the second ship scoops them up. This is how they would launder the plexes before selling them on 3rd party web sites for significantly less than ccp sells them for. I only know of this tactic b/c for a while I and some of my corp mates would sit cloaked around the system and occasionally we would get to the container and empty it before they did making off with billions in plexes. We were eventually warned to stay away from them as we could be considered co conspirators. I know that as a result of my corps interference and possibly others they started using safe spots and giant secure containers for their transactions. Hopefully this left some sort of log for CCP to track who was trading what to who. But I don't know I stayed out of it after that.

So you might say. So what... Player 3 is the only one that broke the rules and they basically just resold plexes that ccp had already been paid for. Player 2 has a gambling problem and spend a lot of money on plexes that ccp was paid cash for in the beginning so where is the harm. It all comes back to player 1. Because player 2 has a gambling problem that player 3 is happy to violate the EULA to exploit his weak character now Player 1 is forced out of the game due to extremely high plex prices. CCP says its a player driven market and players set the value of the plexes which is true. But if those prices are being affected by those who are participating in EULA violations in mass then is it really a player market? When the market is being heavily affected by 3rd partys who have no interest in the game except how they can make real life money from it against the EULA? Meanwhile the only person in this scenerio who is actually trying to play the game as intended and earn isk to buy plexes is suffering the market repercussions of the addicted gambler and the EULA violators.

Now I doubt anything will be done about it. It would be nice if CCP has anyone investigating things like this if they could just track at least a sample of the plexes being bought on the market and see what is happening to them. I highly doubt that even 1/2 of them are being applied to game time which is what they were intended for.

In the end it is not just the plexing player who suffers. CCP will make less money in the end too. If a player wants to spend rl money to buy plexes to sell for isk and they need 2 billion isk for "whatever" they want to buy then how many plexes do they need to buy? Just 2. B/c plex prices are over 1 bill isk at todays prices. Now if the prices hadn't been inflated over the last year and a half and plexes still sold for only around 500 mill isk like they did back then, then the same player would have to buy 2 x as many plexes to reach his isk needs thereby giving CCP 2 x as much money. Now the player buying the plex from CCP might not like that but it gives CCP a lot more money to improve the game in the long run which is something we all want. It also makes it a 2 x as easy for the noob player who can't afford rl money to play the ability to stay with the game and be a target for all the pvpers out there. Another great reason to have lower plex prices.

I don't mean to rant but if you can't see how inflating plex prices hurts everyone in the game by now then you shouldn't be playing such a complex game. You clearly are not mentally prepared. If you can't see how 3rd party sites trading in game assets like plexes hurts the game market then again find a simpler game like tic tac toe. I'm sure it will be more your speed. If you are a dev reading this please consider these points. I hope you already have but if you havn't this is just going to become a bigger issue as time goes on. Just think how little money you will make selling plexes and how many accounts you will lose when the isk price for a plex hits 2 bill... or even 3 bill or worse. Those with isk in game and no more motivation to keep actually playing. Or who have a gambling problem will keep buying plexes until they are out of isk no matter how high they get. Those profiting off of these gambling sites will keep RMTing them until you stop them or those players dry up their own wallets.